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Random Comments from Google Developer Day

I went to Google Developer Day. Yeah, yeah, I know, that was weeks ago, and I'm only finally blogging about it now. Better late than never! Here are some random, sparse comments:

Keynote

There were about 1500-5000 developers world wide attending this event. A ton of APIs were launched in 2006. He mentioned Yahoo Pipes. Google Mashup Editor is a mashup of mashups. I felt pretty overwhelmed pretty quickly. Gears is about offline access for Web apps. It supports all major browsers and all major platforms. It's pretty weird to see SQL in JavaScript. It's based on SQLObject. There is a managed "sync" process. Google Reader will soon work offline. They're working closely with Adobe (e.g. Apollo). It was weird to hear the Adobe guy say, "Works on Linux". Sergey has a great sense of humor.

Gears Talk

You can configure a set of URLs for it to capture for use offline. This stuff is stored in a place separate of the normal browser cache. I saw a bit of code, "rs.getFieldByName('name')". Ugh! Why must people force JavaScript to look like Java? Don't they know that they could do "rs.name"? They implemented a worker pool so you can run JavaScript in the background. These are processes, so they don't have shared state. You can pass code as strings between the processes. They're adding full text search to SQLite.

Google Infrastructure Talk

Google was still at Stanford in '97. In their current design for servers, they went back to not using cases for the servers. They're still using low end hardware. Note that GFS is not at the kernel level. They have 200+ clusters. MapReduce is not used for user search. It's more for heavy duty tasks like indexing. BigTable is pretty amazing. It's a distributed, multi-dimensional, sparse map. They have fine-grained load balancing and fast recovery. They have distributed locks and a locking service. Their largest [BigTable?] is 3000TB on several thousand machines. I asked, and he said that open sourcing GFS "isn't unthinkable".

Google Web Toolkit

Ajax lets the server be stateless. The Java IDE they're using works with Google Web Toolkit even though the Java is being compiled down to JavaScript. Even setting breakpoints works, although to do this they're using a "hosted Web browser". A big benefit of GWT is that the IDE's refactoring support can be used on code that is getting compiled to JavaScript. All the compiling is done behind the scenes, so it feels more like editing a scripting language than editing a compiled language. In general, they prefer functionality over "bling". Hence, they prefer native UI elements rather than recreating all elements from scratch. GWT does the right thing with browser history. They use property files for I18N. They can catch errors in the property files as compile time. They do have nice advanced widgets. Font size changes are handled gracefully. The functional demos were pretty impressive. GWT takes care of managing the image cache really nicely. The compiler only puts in the JS libraries you actually need. Cute quote: "Even though it's open source, we decided to document it." If you're using GWT, you don't need to be an expert in browser quirks, you just need to know Java. GWT supports inline JavaScript.

Alex Martelli's Design Patterns in Python Talk

This is the third time I've seen this talk, and this time I was able to understand everything he said ;)

Theorizing the Data: Avoiding the Capital Mistake

This was a great talk about statistical approaches to linguistics. Probability stats papers were really big at the ACM in 2006. Everyone is fighting the spam problem. The speaker emphasized that more data results in better results, which is why he went to Google. Lots of data results in good machine learning which results in more useable language translations. In trying to do automated translations, nothing matter more than statistics. Getting hints from linguists wasn't all that helpful when they tried it. It would appear that humans may learn language by having a statistical understanding of patterns; after all, there are too many rules with too many exceptions.